


Dark Was The Night

by princesskay



Series: Claire/Frank Missing Scenes [5]
Category: House of Cards (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Bittersweet, Episode Related, Episode: s03e05 Chapter 31, Existentialism, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-16
Updated: 2017-09-16
Packaged: 2018-12-30 15:26:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,468
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12111690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princesskay/pseuds/princesskay
Summary: She doesn’t know what to trust anymore - certainly not herself. There’s been a shift in their foundation, a type of nauseating limbo that’s subtle, yet swift and insidious. It’s not loneliness that frightens her, but the loss of identity. So much of her is bound up in him it’s difficult to tell where he ends and she begins.When Claire suggested they finish talking about Israel in the morning, she hadn't meant it as invitation, but he takes it as one.





	Dark Was The Night

_Absence makes the heart grow fonder_ \- it really is true. She can’t recall the last time they spent four whole days away from one another. Longer since she’s had a mind to apologize to him for anything.

But after spending the last few months sleeping in a different bed, maybe it’s that absence - that distance of no more than ten feet - that’s greater than having to be in separate cities and miles apart.

Perhaps it’s that distance that’s made her forget he doesn’t need or want her apology.

She doesn’t know what to trust anymore - certainly not herself. There’s been a shift in their foundation, a type of nauseating limbo that’s subtle, yet swift and insidious. It’s not loneliness that frightens her, but the loss of _identity_. So much of her is bound up in him it’s difficult to tell where he ends and she begins.

Tonight, she’s more inclined to let those hooks and ropes twist deeper. The power she longs for has seeped out of familiarity, but she can’t deny the numbing, careless pleasure of practiced hands and lips.

He follows her up to the residence from the Oval, his pace matching her slow, methodical steps across familiar carpet. The sound of the lock bolting shut behind him still rings through her ears as she makes her way toward her room.

_Let’s finish talking about Israel in the morning._

Perhaps she hadn’t consciously meant it to be an invitation, but he takes it as one.

She pauses with her hand on the doorknob of her bedroom, acutely aware of his gaze perforating the back of her head.

This time, the invitation is by choice; she leaves the door open behind her.

Leaving the lights off, she wanders toward the bed, her fingers unraveling the silk blouse from her wrists. A floorboard creaks behind her, but she doesn’t look back. She knows exactly where he is.

She pauses next to the bed as she reaches back to unzip the skirt. The fabric slides from her hips without hesitation, pooling at her feet in quiet rustle. Her skin prickles, anticipation dancing like tiny lightning strikes down her spine.

His presence looms behind her, and she feels herself drawn like a magnet of opposite charge to his pull. When he finally touches her, the gentle brush of his palm and the faint scrape of his nails down the middle of her back sends fierce heat pulsing down the length of her body.

She purses her lips over a twisted sound of need. Dismal heat curls up her throat and cheeks, shame nearly overshadowing desire. She hates how much she wants this - how much she _needs_ him. She’s been spurning his advances for weeks now, and hiding behind this door, but she’s not immune to this manic thirst rising from between her thighs. Her own touch can only satisfy so much.

His fingers grip her waist, turning her despite the locked resistance of her limbs.

She can see his eyes, brimming and burning with desire, through the dark. He can no doubt see hers, flaring and self-destructing like a supernova.

He clutches her cheeks, and draws her forward.

She presses her eyes shut, both hands reaching up out of instinct to clutch at his shoulders.

His mouth still tastes faintly of smoke. It’s been so long since she swallowed that flavor, but it’s not yet overwritten by distrust and resentment. It’s there, buried below the surface, in the secluded, sanguine part of her brain that holds onto a childlike belief in reconciliation.

She leans into the kiss, allowing present and past to meld and blur. The walls of the White House fade away - she can imagine their old townhouse outside the city, or even the first home her father bought for them. She can pretend to go back in time, and she can pretend that they still love each other the way they once did.

_What could it hurt?_

_She’s lonely and aching, and it’s just one night._

His hands map out her body, rediscovering every inch and curve with avid, smoldering fervor. The last stitches of lace that stand between his touch and her skin fall away, etching vulnerability and desire into her, down to the bone.

She quakes beneath the subdued caress of his hand, finding it’s way languorously between her legs. She’s churning with the molten heat of need, her limbs melting away to useless extensions of her quivering, gushing core. She moves her shuddering knees apart at the nudge of her fingers, hearing only the liquid pump of her body, the thud of her heart and brain, drawing in scraping breaths only to survive the next few seconds of crushing, _aching_ arousal.

When his fingers caress her slick folds, laying her open, leaving her swollen clit bare and twitching in agony, she wilts against him, her mouth stretching open in wordless, white-hot pleasure. He let’s her suffer for mere seconds - that seem to her like an eternity - before he draws his fingertips over the tumescent bud of her clitoris.

She muffles a strangled cry into his shoulder, her breath clouding hot into the fine material.

The swirl of his fingers draw pangs of quaking arousal from deep within her - unwinding her with this restrained caress. A cry bubbles unbidden from her chest, and she quells it by sinking her teeth into his shoulder. The shirt absorbs her saliva; his skin yields to her teeth. She sucks in a breath past the taste of fabric, lungs quivering for nourishment under the need pummeling her ribs.

His arms circles tighter around her waist, and drags her around to the bed.

His fingers slip away as he guides her down to the mattress. She wants to scream at the agony his touch leaves behind, but her throat is locked, any sound or protest she might make muted by her pride - her lingering insistence that she hadn’t _tried_ to create this outcome.

She sinks into the downy coverlet, reticent and curling her fists against the tremors ghosting through her.

He positions himself next to her, thigh pressed to hers. Leaning over her, he reaches down to urge her legs apart.  Meeting his eyes this time, she let’s herself be _consumed_ instead of doubtful, _desperate_ instead of ashamed.

The distinction is significant, yet she passes it over with a deep breath, a lifted chin - barely the breadth of a second. She lets her brain go hazy in this amalgamating mess of emotion and instinct, knowing with pessimistic resolve that this one night won’t change _a thing_.

He restrains her arms above her head, and she doesn’t protest. He unlaces the final stays of her resistance with a familiar, well-worn journey down her trembling belly and between her pale thighs. She welcomes the ache that closes its jaws around her tender center, the surging, hot _hunger_ for climax that pairs inseparably to his stroking fingers.

His name twists from her lips - a curse and a demand rather than plea for mercy.

Her eyes clamp shut over the flashing white that blooms from the corners of her eyes. Seeing only black behind her eyelids, she sinks like Alice down the rabbit hole, into a swirling tunnel - helpless, _hopeless_ in her search for the bottom. He manipulates her from behind that curtain of blackness, the simple, archaic stroke of his hand dictating her every breath and moan.

The mechanics of sex and desire have been crafted since the beginning of time - and there’s only imagined, _manufactured_ elegance in desperate copulation. There’s nothing special about this brand of angry, reckless need charging through her chest, but she wants to believe _no one_ has ever suffered the way she has. Such isolation could elevate this base, and morbid hunger gnawing her down to the core, and could perhaps justify this maddening contradiction to the tempered steel of anger and hurt that she’s allowed to build walls around her heart.

But she knows without opening her eyes, even in the throws of orgasm, that the answer can only be found in the deepest of human failings, in her own collection of _pitiful_ weaknesses, in her own gaunt fears of loneliness.

Tiny, spasmodic explosions ripple through her, each one setting off like a bomb that shatters her grip on reality. Fantasy lingers like a tapestry over her quaking body, pushed back and away from her eyes by the dismal thoughts urging against her brain. She can almost _feel_ that awareness melt away, just beyond the crest of the next spasm, but the waves are coming in lower, and lower, and when she’s left in a puddle of used, quaking flesh, she opens her eyes to see solid walls, silken sheets, and the unavoidable weight of Francis’ eyes.

 _No Wonderland, only a wasteland_.

He bends to kiss her breast. She doesn’t fight, only lets out low sigh, as he presses his mouth along the curve of her breast, and bites softly at her hardened nipple.

She hears the low clink of metal as he unbuckles his belt, and the obtrusive grind of a lowering zipper. He discards his trousers over the edge of the bed, and rolls over her, between her limp thighs.

She bites her lip as his hard cock presses against her.

His hands frame her jaw, forcing her to look up at him. She blinks slowly, avoiding the press of his gaze with the only defense she can render.

“Claire …”

It’s the first time he’s spoken since they entered the room, and his voice echoes through her like a punch to the chest.

She draws in a shaky breath, distrusting her voice to speak.

“What is it you want?” He whispers, pressing his mouth against her cheek. He leaves a slow trail of kisses behind his mouth until he reaches her earlobe, “Tell me, what is it you want from me?”

“I _have_ what I want.” She murmurs, her own voice sounding foreign to her ear. “The UN position …”

“Yes, but what do you want from _me_?”

“This.”

He lifts his head to look into her eyes. He’s convinced he can tell if she’s lying, and perhaps he can. She wouldn’t have cared. He won’t run rough-shod into her chest, prying her chest open with a crowbar to find her heart. He won’t. He _can’t._

“ _This_.” She undulates her hips against him. “Fuck me.”

A frown curls between his brows. He dissects her with his gaze for a second longer, before he accepts what he cannot change.

He clutches her jaw - making _certain_ she’ll look at him - and rolls his hips against her. She feels him nudge against her, and then slide into her soft, slick opening. He offers up a trembling moan as their bodies connect and fuse. She locks her ankles against his lower back, her best and only reply.

She closes her eyes as he begins to rock against her; he can’t _force_ her to look. She absorbs each blow of his hips, and the unavoidable pleasure of his cock grinding deep into her, a bare smile carved across her mouth.

It’s horribly ironic, she thinks. She’s taken a dozen partners between moments of happiness with her marriage, and each of them has held one single thing in common - _escape_. The freeing, drug-like quality of letting another man fuck her senseless while her body disconnects from her mind, and she leaves the disjointed, dark pieces of herself behind in favor of the wide-eyed dreamer hiding behind the curtains is one she’s returned to time and again. She can think of happiness, she can think of a life without the constant struggle for power when it’s someone she hardly knows, but cares for too deeply.

That _duplicity_ strikes her with stunning, numbing cruelty now as she writhes and thrusts against her husband - the man she’s spent a lifetime running to and from, and now, the man who holds that escape in the same hand he holds their demise. The two halves of her soul circles back around to meet one another underneath him - her husband, her partner, her lover, whom she’s starting to realize she hardly knows, but cares for too deeply.

 

~

 

“Do you want me to leave?”

They’ve been lying sprawled across the bed on their backs in utter silence for several minutes - she doesn’t know how many. His release is coagulating inside her.

She draws in a breath. “No.”

He looks over at her, and she finds the courage to look back.

“Do you want me to stay with you tonight?”

“You can, if you like.”

“But is that what you _want_?”

She clenches her jaw, and turns her gaze back to the ceiling. _He can never take anything at face value._

“Claire, I won’t force my way in here.” He says, propping himself up on his elbow. He leans into her field of vision, his gaze tearing the shreds of her composure apart.

“I said I didn’t want you to leave.”

He bends down to her kiss her, softly. She knows he’ll _never_ kiss anyone else this way, and that realization hurts more than every other one before.

They’re hanging by a thread. The transgressions are too great to ignore, the _distance_ between them spanning more than just a ten foot hall between separate bedrooms. Years of minor aggressions and greater wounds lean harder and harder into the dam they built to contain them.

She wishes that thread would break, if only to put them both out of their misery.

_But not tonight._

She crawls into his arms, pressing her face into his neck, breathing deep the familiar scent of him. He starts to hum, the tune vibrating through his skin and into hers.

She recognizes “Dark Was The Night.”

She closes her eyes. _Cold was the ground._

Suddenly, it all seems futile - the two of them clinging to one another, hoping the other can save the dying flame of their love. Pretending to breathe life into something that’s already done and gone. Desperate to save it because it’s _safe_ and familiar, and maybe they’ll lose a part of themselves with it if it falls apart.

A lesser person would be sobbing and pleading, but she feels strangely apathetic with his arms around her. Strangely out of control of her own life. Perhaps she’s fallen into a deep slumber, a dream, a nightmare.

But she knows that’s a _lie_.

_What are we humans, but an arrangement of atoms - stardust, flung out into the middle of space on a spinning satellite, constantly flying on some undirected path toward eternity, constantly reinventing ourselves in bright, exploding flashes of self-immolation, whose light will stretch on until the end of time?_

A death will always beget new life, but for this small, quiet moment, to the tune of the blues, there’s only darkness.

~the end~

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! :)
> 
> You can also find me on [Tumblr!](http://clairehales.tumblr.com//)!


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